Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest book “2312″ is set in that titular year in a Solar System alive with busy humans and thousands of artificial habitats carved from asteroids. Earth is a crowded mess, home to eleven billion humans, but no longer the home of thousands of species, now only preserved, flourishing in fact, in the
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If our Universe is open, either flat or hyperbolic in geometry, then it will expand forever… or at least until space-time’s warranty expires and a new vacuum is born from some quantum flip. Prior to that, most likely immensely distant, event the regular stars will go out and different sources of energy will be needed
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Two recent arXiv preprints combined make for an interesting idea. Here’s the most recent Science headline maker… Some black holes may be older than time …which handily has the arXiv link… Persistence of black holes through a cosmological bounce …Carr & Coley pose the idea that some black holes get through a cosmological Bounce (a
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The first planets to form probably attracted a primary atmosphere of H/He from the solar Nebula. In our Solar System these were driven off from the four Inner Planets and retained by the Outer Giants, but in theory smaller planets can retain such a mixture. I’ve speculated about such worlds on these blog pages before
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Some recent news pieces have expanded possible locales for Life. We’ve looked at… Supernova made Earths warmed via Dark Matter …and we’ll look at… White Dwarf Habitable Zones …but a new(ish) idea is “failed stars” – brown dwarfs, but smaller than the 13 Jupiter-mass deuterium-burning limit – might be suitable for life based on other
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Since my first brief note on R.J.Spivey’s essay two newer versions have appeared… Version 1: From fermions to the Fermi paradox: a fertile cosmos fit for life? Version 2: Fermi’s pardox and the interpretation of the stelliferous era Version 3: A biotic cosmos demystified? …while other researchers have asked whether Dark Matter has a role
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White Dwarfs are already relatively common in the Galaxy, but as the Universe ages they will proliferate. About 200 billion will form before the gas runs out for star formation in the Milky Way. But by then the Milky Way and Andromeda’s M31 will merge as ‘Milkomeda’ – a largish Elliptical Galaxy – roughly doubling
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R.J.Spivey writes a provocative essay for the arXiv… From Fermions to the Fermi Paradox: A Fertile Cosmos Fit for Life? …basically Spivey suggests we’re jumping to conclusions too soon about Life in the Cosmos, that the real party is after our current Stelliferous Era, when Life exists in a multitude of planets formed from supernova
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In the previous post I mentioned the Femtotech discussion at H+ Magazine… There’s Plenty More Room at the Bottom: Beyond Nanotech to Femtotech …and a companion piece… Searching for Phenomena in Physics that May Serve as Bases for a Femtometer Scale Technology …both discussing the prospects for femtotech, which is femtometre scale technology or manipulation
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